In this chapter…

This is the chapter that most users think they want first,
because they come to structured documents from a wordprocessing
environment where the only way to convey
different types of information is to fiddle with the font and
size drop-down menus.

As you will have seen by now, this is normally unnecessary
in LATEX, which does most of the work for you automatically.
However, there are occasions when you need to make manual
typographic changes, and this chapter is about how to do
them.

Some authors — and perhaps some
designers — believe that consistency is undesirable,
and that double-page layouts in printed books should each
be designed independently. Valerie Kirschenbaum’s magnificent Goodbye Gutenberg expresses this
both eloquently and attractively, but the cost of such
design labour and the cost of four-colour printing on all
pages places it beyond the reach of most publishers’
budgets until the economics of on-demand four-colour
‘printing’ makes it
possible.

This does not apply for the German technique
in blackletter type of using letter-spacing
instead of (non-existent) italics. The defaults in
the soul package were designed
to cater for this.

The pslatex package is also
said to be outdated by some experts because it
implements rather long-windedly what can now be
done in three commands. However, until these
replace the current version, I recommend
continuing to use pslatex when
you want Times with Helvetica and narrow
Courier.

Although if you’re a typographer wanting to
experiment with typewriter typefaces with and without
serifs, you can use METAFONT or
FontForgeto do exactly this
kind of thing. But that’s way outside the scope of
this document.